Thursday, 12 July 2012

Yesterday was the official close of the conference as we
move into workshops on Friday. First up I gave my Pecha Kucha (PK) talk on the
Party Infrastructure Project that I was involved with at the National Libraryof Australia. I gave this presentation as an individual, as I no longer work at
the NLA and it’s not reflective of my work at Griffith University. For those
not familiar with it, Pecha Kucha comes from the Japanese and refers to ‘the
sound of conversation’. The presentation format is 20 slides at 20 seconds per
slide which is a 6 minute 40 seconds presentation. The transition between
slides is set automatically so the presenter has no choice but to keep
ploughing on, even if they haven’t finished talking about the previous slide
when the next one comes up. At OR2012 this is a Fringe event with several PK
sessions, each very well attended. The format gives the audience a flavour for
the topic, which they can find out more about afterwards should they choose,
and frankly, it’s a bit of an intellectual blood sport. There’s a sort of
perverse enjoyment of seeing the fear in the presenters eyes as they race
through slides at breakneck speed. As that presenter yesterday, I admit to
being terribly fearful and to speaking awfully quickly. I had a lag time of
half a sentence or so on a couple of slides but came up on time for most of
them. There’s an art in preparing the slides with more pictures and very few
words that I didn’t get quite right, and you essentially have to script your
words – only three sentences or so per slide. If you stumble over words or
blither on, precious time is lost. I found it more difficult than the full
paper talk I gave yesterday on Griffith’s data evolution journey, particularly
as there are some very complex concepts in the party infrastructure and you
simply can’t explain satisfactorily at 20 seconds per slide. I have total
admiration for those who speak English as a second language and rose to the
challenge of presenting a PK!

We gathered in the George Square lecture theatre at the
University of Edinburgh to hear the official conference close before moving
into workshops over the next day and a half. 460 people registered for OR2012
representing 40 countries. Of these, I counted six Australians and one New
Zealander though the delegate list may reveal some I didn’t catch up with in
person. Queensland had the greatest representation with QUT, UQ and Griffith
all represented. The Australasians had a small but surprisingly loud presence,
as each of us gave a talk, PK or workshop. The charismatic Peter Sefton from
University of Western Sydney was on the conference committee and chaired the
Developers Challenge. The challenge was sponsored by DevCSI and was to “show us something new
and cool in the world of open repositories”. They had the best ever response to
the challenge this year with 28 ideas. The winner was Patrick McSweeney with
his ‘Data Engine’ idea and the runners up also put together a great idea about
using mobile devices in the field to upload audio and video files, with
transcriptions, into a repository. You can read about the Developers Challenge
winners here.

At the closing plenary we saw a nice little wordle based on the
conference tweets. The word ‘data’ was very prominent, as was (of course)
repositories, but it showed that data is now mainstream whereas in past
conferences it has been more of a side issue. Reflecting on the theme of ‘Open Services for Open Content: Local In
for Global Out’the discussion highlights were summarised
as: a recognition of the role of registries; identifiers (how to use, manage
and economise); citation (sufficiency, connectivity) and repository fringe
(success of). The folks from Prince Edward Island off the East coast of Canada
will be hosting next year’s OR and gave a very enjoyable presentation on what
we can expect, should we have the fortune to attend. Personally, I thought this
was an excellent conference. Edinburgh is a beautiful city and the conference
had a wonderful and distinctly Scottish flavour. At the same time, it was truly
international conference and that led to a diversity of experiences and ideas
which made for rich discussions about repositories and related issues,
particularly on shared challenges such as name and data identifiers. I’ve had
the opportunity to meet and talk with some very clever and talented people and
I’ll take home some good ideas and pertinent thoughts on difficult topics. This
unique conference with its Scottish flavour will linger for quite some time yet
and I hope I have been able to share some of it with you. Finally, it’s stopped raining!

Last night I arrived with Paula Callan at the conference
dinner, which was held at the magnificent National Museum of Scotland. We were
greeted by a man in a kilt playing the bagpipes at the entrance who was at
pains to concentrate on playing as we posed for a few pictures. This set the
scene for dinner in the main hall surrounded by unique museum pieces on the
walls and throughout the hall including a row of weapons such as double headed
axes, an Egyptian statue, and a huge lighthouse beacon. Following dinner was
the ‘Ceilidh’ which I fortunately heard someone pronounce before I needed to
say it aloud: ‘kay-lay’. It’s an evening of Scottish dancing and music. The
whir of kilts and people bumping into each other like dodgems was the order of
the first few dances. It was certainly a memorable night in Edinburgh!

The best conference session I attended yesterday was on the
topic of name and data identifiers. Simeon Warner from Cornell University
opened the session with an update on the ORCID
project and made a case for why you should use ORCID’s in your repository. He
made the point that other author identification systems have failed because
they were not adopted widely enough. Certainly the National Library of
Australia’s party infrastructure needs a critical mass to really take off in
the research sector and to realise its full potential. ORCID has 328
participant organisations. Researchers can self claim in the ORCID model and
institutions can also register. There will be two tier APIs. A Tier 1 API available
to everyone and a Tier 2 API available to members only. There is a development
site at http://dev.orcid.org/. My thoughts
arising from the session:

·Publisher buy-in is critical for a names project
like this. If they get it, people will use it for certain because the benefits
will be obvious.

·Simeon said that organisations will be prompted
to resolve duplicates. This happens in the workflows where the author records
you provide as an organisation are automatically matched – or attempted to be
matched – against author records already in ORCID. But he said that they had
not yet worked out how organisations would resolve the duplicates and that they
were working with some organisations to work that through. This is also critical.
No one wants to hand match records, but there is only so match automatic
matching can achieve before an actual person needs to review the records and
disambiguate. Hand matching can cost time and money and may require training.

·It’s unclear how ORCID will relate to the wide
range of national name identifier schemes out there, including the one we have
in Australia.

Amanda Hill from the University of Manchester then spoke
about the UK Names Project run by MIMAS
and the British Library with funding from JISC. The project has been in a pilot
phase and its ultimate aim, should it secure further funding, would be to have
a high quality set of persistent unique identifiers for UK researchers and
research institutions. However ORCID may occupy the space and render national
name identifier schemes, including the one we have in Australia, somewhat
superfluous. We’ll have to wait and see on that one. If ORCID works, it will be
fantastic. Two other interesting points from Amanda’s talk:

·They ran a survey asking if people would be
willing to pay for additional name related services (disambiguation) and about
a quarter said that they would.

·They developed an API that allows for flexible
searching of names data and uses a plugin for ePrints. It allows repository
users to choose from a list of names identities and to create a new record if
none exists [but I did not see identifiers as a match point].

The final talk in this session
was by Ryan Scherle from Dryad in the USA on ‘creating citeable data
identifiers’. As a ‘DOI geek’ myself, I was keen to hear what he had to say.
While he presented a somewhat controversial list of ‘principles of citable
identifiers’, he made some excellent points. He said you should use DOIs
because they are familiar to scientists. When you use a DOI you get a certain
amount of weight assigned to your paper. DOIs are supported by many tools and
services. But most repositories don’t support DOIs. This point alludes to my
own feeling that the value of DOIs for research data collections – as distinct
from other persistent identifiers - is in their political clout. They are
standard in the publishing world, researchers understand them, they add value
in the researcher’s eye, they allow for citations and citation tracking which
is of much value to researchers. I spoke to Ryan afterwards and got a
description of the workflows in which a scientist has an article about to be
published, uploads their data to Dryad, which gives them a DOI for the dataset,
and then that DOI is included in the published article. Tracking data citation
is still a manual process for them (sigh) but so good he could show some
statistics on this. Check out the Dryad data repository at http://datadryad.org/

Another good session I attended
yesterday was on share repository services and infrastructure. I’d like to find
out more about the ‘Collabratorium Digitus Humanitas’ project between a few
institutions in North America. The NYPL are part of this, and they are
reconfiguring their repository to take in alot more video and audio from their
collections, looking at online streaming platforms, a nice front end and so on.
This is relevant to Griffith, and reflects a theme at the conference where
institutions are looking at increasing their multimedia content but unsure what
platforms will be good for this. There’s a session on multimedia in Islandora
on Friday – that may offer an insight.

I gave my talk
on Griffith’s research data journey as part of a panel on research data
infrastructure. The other speakers were Anthony Beitz from Monash University
and Sally Rumsey from the University of Oxford. I think the talk was well
received, as was the session in general as we each provided different insights
in managing research data at our respective institutions. There were some excellent questions including one from Simon Hodson from
JISC about the availability of
statistics to show the success of research data infrastructure in facilitating
discovery and re-use.

I’ve ticked one more off my to-do
list: found out what a ‘sporran’ is (a small bag worn on a kilt).

Wednesday, 11 July 2012

I’m going to start with the end of day two of the conference
and work backwards from there. At the end of the day, there was a drinks
reception and poster session held at the Playfair Library, University of
Edinburgh. The library is in the old part of the University. It’s an incredible
building that was built in the 1820s and has an ornately decorated high vaulted
ceiling and rows of books silently looked upon by busts of University
professors long past. You can take a look at it here. It was wonderful
venue to view the 60+ posters presented at this conference. And yes, they
served Haggis – as balls on a stick that you dipped into a sauce.

In the morning I participated in a workshop on the Confederation of Open Access
Repositories . COAR was created in October 2009 by partners of the driver project. It’s a not-for-profit organisation
with 90 members, none of which are in Australia. The purpose is to facilitate greater
visibility of open access repositories. There are three working groups to do
this, each with a different focus: content, interoperability and
training/support. The workshop was about the interoperability roadmap. There
was certainly alot of useful references in the document the interoperability
working group has produced but it’s unclear to me how COAR members will actually
use the information. Perhaps the training group is of greatest value to those
of us in Australia because the next round of it is free, online and you don’t
have to be a member of COAR to enrol in it. There is a list of COAR’s upcoming
training here.
It costs to be a member, some 2, 500
euro’s – so perhaps that’s another reason why there are no Australian members
yet.

After lunch the conference officially opened with an opening
plenary from Cameron Neylon (PLoS). The PLoS
website has an article on the Finch Report, which is worth a read, as it’s
such a hot topic in the UK. Cameron highlighted the qualitative leap forward
made possible by researcher collaboration using internet tools. Complex problems which even the primary expert
in a field thinks is too difficult to solve may be solved through collaboration
via the internet even with its most rudimentary tools. Following his talk, we
had an hour of posters: minute madness. This is where poster presenters have
one minute to pitch to the audience why they should visit their poster at the
drinks reception later in the evening. If you don’t finish by the end of the
minute, the chair blows a whistle in your ear. It was a real hoot and you get a
flavour of the huge variety of repository initiatives around the world in a
short space of time. The session reflect this is truly is an international
conference reflected in the huge representation of countries as delegates and
poster presenters (including our very own Paula Callan). A few poster
highlights (there were 68 posters!): can linkedin enhance access to open
repositories? ; History data management plan at the University of Hull;
OpenAire in Europe linking articles with data; Creating, attracting and
depositing non-traditional content.

After this I went to the session on research data management
and infrastructure. The University of Exeter is an interesting case as they
have three repositories and are looking to merge all three using DSpace, Oracle
and SWORD2. The talk was mostly about their postgrad initiatives, however I
will try and find the speaker over the course of the conference and find out
more on their repository project. I enjoyed the talk by Leslie Johnson from the
Library of Congress. It was an honest and revealing look at how LoC are now
interacting with faculty and researchers that have inspired new ways of
delivering data including the transition to a self serve model that is very
different from the old model where researchers would need to come physically
into the library and interact with a librarian. She referred to the Digging into Data Challenge.

The day ended with the drinks and poster reception and then I
had dinner out with Jackie Wickham and others from the RSP and the University
of Nottingham. I’ve crossed a few more things off my ‘to do’ list: hear someone
speak Gaelic (at the drinks reception) and listen to ‘Scotland the Brave’ played
on the bagpipes (actually this is rather unavoidable if you are anywhere near
the Royal Mile which is a road over a 1000 years old that leads from the Castle
to Holyrood Palace). As an aside, I discovered the word ‘Kirk’ does not refer
to ‘James T’ (as in Star Trek – for those less geeky) but it’s the Scottish
word for ‘church’. And yes, it’s still raining.

Monday, 9 July 2012

This is my second visit to Edinburgh and the real character
and old world charm of ‘auld reekie’ is captivating despite the constant
drizzle. I walked to OR2012 from my apartment through the old town which takes
you past the magnificent Edinburgh Castle and up winding cobblestone streets in
an area once known for public hangings and witch trials (now home restaurants,
cafes and pubs). Then it was past the museum and on to the University of
Edinburgh, once home to two of my favourite authors: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and
Robert Louis Stevenson. On the way to the conference buildings, I was fortunate
to pass Doyle’s old home at the university, marked only by a simple commemorative
plaque. A few doors down, the former residence of Sir Walter Scott.

Most of the conference takes place in Appleton Tower, which houses
the offices of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC). Anthony Beitz from Monash
University organised for us to meet with staff from the DCC and Peter Sefton
from UWS also joined in. With a backdrop of magnificent views of Edinburgh, we
exchanged experiences, thoughts and ideas. The DCC has produced some terrific
guides for data management planning and data citation that we can use back
home. They also do some great work in supporting institutions with their
research data initiatives despite some interesting challenges in this area.

In the afternoon I attended a workshop on ‘Building a
National Network’ chaired by the awesome Jackie Wickham from the Repositories Support
Project at the University of Nottingham. This confirmed for me that the UK have
done a great job in establishing a support network for repository development and for repository staff that
made me green with envy. The RSP, for example, offers or facilitates:
training, conferences, residential schools, webinars, support tools, site
visits, help desk, blog and a buddy scheme (among other things!). UKCoRR offers
targeted support for repository staff and most importantly, JISC provides
support through its building infrastructure programs and through project funding.
The UK repositories face similar challenges to us in terms of increasing full
text content, advocacy for open access, building systems around academics, getting
critical support from senior management and increasing different types of
content in their repositories, specifically creative arts and research data.

Some thoughts arising from the workshop:

·“Mandates with no teeth”. Just because deposit
is policy, doesn’t mean academics will comply with it.·When a metadata record is created in a
repository, an email is automatically generated and sent to the author asking if
they can supply the full text of the article. Could we do the same but for
research data?·The University of Glasgow has a showcase
repository having carried out a number of initiatives driving deposit such as
presentations, flyers and reminders to academics of compliance with funding
requirements. Could we use any of this in our open access week?·How can we strengthen our repository network in
Australia/NZ? We can definitely participate in the RSP webinars, though the
times may not work out well.·The Finch Report is a hot topic here. I haven’t
read much about it but I’ve heard it’s good the UK government is recognising
the importance of open access but it takes repositories out of the picture.·Balviar Notay from JISC mentioned Repnet, which
pulls different services together. There is an innovation zone for injecting
new ideas and working with developers to try them out. There are rapid
innovation projects and an oversight group with international membership.·You’ve heard of Sherpa Romeo. Well, now there’s
Juliet. While he summarises publishers policies on self deposit, she lists
funding requirements for open access.

Tomorrow will be day two. In the
meantime, I’m working on my ‘to do’ list. So far I have crossed off ‘visit the
castle, try a Jammie Dodger (jam biscuit) and buy something tartan’.

Thursday, 5 July 2012

In just under 7 hours I'll be stepping on a plane. 25 hours of flying (countless more sitting around at airports in transit desperate for a shower) and 16, 315 kilometers later I'll touch down in Edinburgh. And it'll still be the same day I left Brisbane! After a short recovery, I'll be going to the Open Repositories conference (OR2012) at the University of Edinburgh. There are over 400 people registered and the agenda looks terrific. I'm looking forward to the 'buzz' as people who work with each other across distances meet up in person. On Monday morning, I'm heading to the Digital Curation Centre to meet up with some DCCers, and in the afternoon, I'll be going to a workshop chaired by Jackie Wickham from the Repositories Support Project. I'm a bit of a fan of her work and I'm looking forward to catching up with her and Dominic Tate from UKCorr for lunch. On Wednesday I'm presenting on Griffith's Data Evolution Journey (the Research Hub) and then on Thursday I give a Pecha Kucha on the Party Infrastructure Project. The latter was pretty tricky to nail down in such a short presentation time - hopefully it will roll smoothly. This is a new blog spot for me, a break away from my ANDS Gold Standard Project blog and over the week of the conference, I'll be using it to share the ideas and excitement that OR2012
generates. Scotland, here I come!
- Natasha

About Me

Natasha Simons is a Research Data Management Specialist with the Australian National Data Service, an organisation set up by the Australian Government to enhance the value of data for researchers, research institutions, and the nation. Located at Griffith University in Brisbane, Natasha serves on the Council of Australian University Librarians Research Advisory Committee and is an ORCID Ambassador. She is an author and reviewer of papers related to library and information management and co-authored a 2013 book on digital repositories. Natasha was the Senior Project Manager for the Griffith Research Hub, which won awards from Stanford University and VALA. She is an advocate for open data and open repositories. Natasha is @n_simons on Twitter.